Abstract

During the formative period of ethnobotanical studies in the Southwest, Edward Palmer established a standard for reporting useful plants that continues today and Frank. H. Cushing wrote a classic ethnobotany from an anthropological perspective,Z uni Breadstuff. Since these beginnings single tribal studies and, more recently, archaeobotanical investigations have received emphasis. Linguistic studies of plant names and their classification have lagged and synthetic summaries and interpretative explanations of plant use are still demanded. Anthropology’s unique contribution to Southwestern ethnobotany is relating socially shared plant taxonomies and cultural rules for behaving with plants to explain why certain plants are used and others are ignored.